Māori Housing Trends 2009 - Housing New Zealand

Corporation data will be much more up-to-date (3 months old as opposed to 1 yearold).Calculation of percentages43 Percentages can be calculated in two different ways, either by excluding the numberof people that have not stated a valid response from the denominator (from hereonreferred to as ‘zero-basing’), or by including them. Stats NZ always publishespercentages that are zero-based. However, for the purposes of this report,percentages were calculated including the total number of people in thedenominator. Yet, some sections in this report cite percentages published by StatsNZ that were zero-based. It is clearly referenced throughout the report wherepercentages are not zero-based.44 The difference in the way percentages were calculated does not impact on theability to observe trends over a time period in this report because percentages werecomputed consistently during the time period for a particular data set (e.g. homeownership rates).45 The advantage to including all people rather than all people that gave validresponses in the denominator is that for example home ownership rates are notover-estimated. Using the example of home ownership rates in 2006, about fourpercent of the Māori population did not give a valid response to the tenure question.Zero-basing effectively means that for these four percent their tenure type will beimputed using the same proportions of tenure types of people that gave a validresponse. For example, the home ownership rate calculated using all Māori as thedenominator is 43.3 percent, zero-basing increases the home ownership rate by 2percent to 45.2 percent. However, it might not be justified to assume that all peoplewho did not give a valid response have the same living circumstances as peoplethat did respond validly. This is especially true when considering that the Censusconsistently undercounts people living in state housing 7 .7 CHRANZ (2004: 339-340)7